


Indiego Amor

by Able_Jack



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, bump in the night, critical conversations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-15
Updated: 2016-04-15
Packaged: 2018-06-02 08:32:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6559459
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Able_Jack/pseuds/Able_Jack
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Scully remembers that children raised without language die for want of touch.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Indiego Amor

**Author's Note:**

> Timeline: mid-series, original run  
> Disclaimer: The X-Files and all related characters are the property of Chris Carter, 1013 Productions, and Fox Studios. No profit is made from this work and no infringement is intended.

ACT ONE

The Connecticut loam beneath Scully’s bare feet is rich and springy. Bare toes curl into it as she sprints across the manicured grass of the soccer pitch. Impractical shoes discarded 20 yards back, dark coat flapping, gun hand pumping. 

Ahead of her is another sprinter. A lanky man, moving his limbs with the pure efficiency of terror, and howling as he goes. He is already a good length front of Scully, and gaining distance with every stride. 

“Stop,” she screams, but the man is already across the soccer pitch and entering the scrub woods beyond. She recommits to the run. Watching the thump of her feet, so she doesn’t trip. Then she is stumbling anyway, reeling from the bright and spherical something whizzing past her shoulder. It is burning towards the running man, spilling the same cold light that had filled the school’s windows. It smears her retinas and makes her blind to the branches surrounding her.

Thirty seconds ago she had still been cocooned in the passenger seat of a darkened car. Riding shotgun as Mulder pulled into the long drive fronting a long brick building. 

The building is a preparatory high school, specializing in boarding teenagers who are both wealthy and troublesome. Hammering their authority problems and budding addictions into pre-determined curves, clapping them onto the rigid keel of country club membership and legacy admissions to the Ivy Leagues. 

That much Mulder surrendered willingly, but the actual mission remained firmly ensnared inside his first class ability to adumbrate. 

She’d ignored the creeping curiosity, then she gave in and launched a Mata Hari inspired inquisition as the car swept across the Connecticut line. 

He plucked her hand out of his hair, and held it captive against his chest. “Scully, I want you to _see_ ,” he insisted, his secret making delightful crinkles around his eyes. She pressed the pad of her newly released finger against the fine lines, feeling them deepen with his grin. Then she pinched his earlobe, hard. 

The car was still rolling when the buttery yellow light streaming from the school’s windows blazed into something white and penetrating. Flensing the night with something as bright and shocking as the flash before a mushroom cloud. They both ducked, waiting for the windows to shatter and the boom to peel their flesh. 

No sound followed. Just the hard light, streaming out to lick against the shape of a man as he suddenly bolted past the hood of the car. Scully caught an aperture snap of flailing limbs and wailing terror, then he was past. Running in a direct line away from the school. 

“Go!” her partner yelled, and she had tumbled stiffly from the car. Chasing her rabbiting quarry across the lawn as Mulder blazed a reciprocal course into the maw of the building, disappearing into the light.

And now this burning sphere, adding to the delirium tremens of the night. Eerie in its speed, and blatantly defying physics with its silence. Objects moving with this kind of speed must, by their very nature, compress the air until it screams. 

Scully fights the entangling branches and her ruined night vision, but the man has pulled well ahead of her. She is viciously ripping hair from a voraciously twiggy bush when the woods plunge into darkness.

No, not darkness. The moon and the standard level of light pollution take over, but her doubly offended pupils are slow. First too bright, now too dark. 

She stands until she can see outlines. Then she creeps forward cautiously, gun griped but down, until she finds the running man. He’s come to a halt, and he is staring at the ground and looking wildly deranged. The cold light may be gone, but years of experience with extraordinarily fucked up shit drops Scully into a low shuffle. Gun forward, spots in her vision still swimming purple.

“Where did it go?” she demands. 

The standing man stares at her, panting and wordless. He has just experienced something transformative, and he needs a moment. Scully’s seen it all before, and doesn’t care to wait for him. 

She had run through the woods, and had left Mulder behind to enter that light. It had felt like the high lux lights inside operating theatres. Designed to lance into the beating nucleus of a human body and lay it open to sight. The same light that had filled the empty void she’d been abducted into too all those years ago. Merciless in its utter lack of tenderness.

Right now, she will not imagine him kidnapped and stripped of autonomy. Right now she has more current things to focus on.

“I said where is it!” she gains volume, eyes snapping right, center, left. Gun seeking a target as she moves in to protect the man. 

The man bringing his hands up in a double stop, but he is too late. Scully is suddenly face down and full length on the loamy soil. Sprawled over the exact spot the light had popped out of existence. The slickness under foot surprising as an ice patch.

Forehead pressed to the ground Scully breaths deeply through her nose. The earth smells like clean dirt, and mulching leaves. Behind her, the sound of a disturbance in the woods becomes the leathery slap of size 13 dress shoes trotting along. She allows herself a moment of relief. He is here in the woods. He has not been stolen into the night. 

“Scully!” her partner exclaims happily, bursting into view. “Why are you on the ground? You have to come see. It’s exactly what I thought. A whole circle of them, all working in tandem. It’s a whole new twist on a classic.” His forehead creases. “Why _are_ you on the ground?”

She doesn’t bother answering. She doesn’t ask _a circle of who_ , or _twist on what_. Just takes her finger off the trigger guard and clicks on the safety. Heaving herself up, she exits the ground with a wet slurping noise. She looks down to see something clear and viscous clinging too her. 

Mulder’s eyes go wide. Scully just sighs.

 

ACT TWO

Then follows a short stint of generalized milling. Scully learned this part was necessary when dealing with anyone newly initiate into the deeply fucked up shit club. They always need time to reform their fundamental world view. There is simply no rushing them.

Mulder fills the time by twitching impatiently, and telling her what happened inside the school. He’d followed the light backwards towards its source. Manfully smashing a door from its hinges, and finding beyond the door a large flock of teenagers. Most of the sophomore class, faces intent and hands clasped as they all stood in a circle. He’d broken the circumference, and the light had vanished. 

At least, that was the tale he told while waiting for the teacher to regain his equilibrium. Once the gibbering had wound down, she and Mulder commence towing the school teacher back across the meadow. Part way back, Mulder performs a graceful stooping shuffle, and presents her with her own shoes. Winking solemnly as he hands them back and holding her steady as she puts them back on. 

Scully leans against him a moment longer than strictly necessary. He had run into the light, but he had not been snatched away while her back was turned. No one had spilled his blood, or drilled into his impetuous and beautiful brain. 

Mulder leads her down a long hallway, the school teacher having skedaddled before making it into the building. Scully thinks he will need at least 3 days to fully rationalize this square night into some sort of explainably round hole. Until then he will be knobby kneed, and prone to weeping. Best to have him gone. 

He waves her into a classroom, which is currently occupied by a single boy. Sitting on the floor, arm trailing up towards the radiator because Mulder had handcuffed him to the unit. 

“The ringleader,” her partner tells her, looking towards the captured boy. “I guess the rest of them ran away.”

“How do you know he’s the ringleader.”

“Scully,” Mulder intones with a certain smugness, “I just know these things.” He is radiating enthusiasm. The way a puppy stalks a toy, and thinks himself king of the world for tossing it up and catching it with a snap.

She studies the boy. His forehead and lips have the stamp of some classically Camelot-ish New England family. One of those that circled the outskirts of fame, without ever being so coarse as to become infamous. He has years to go before full growth, and he is already beautiful.

“What’s your name?” she asks him. He shrugs. 

“David Sutton.” Mulder picks up a pencil, rolling it between his fingers, head craning back to survey the ceiling. Like any good man of mystery, he doesn’t reveal the source of his knowledge. Scully watches him choose a likely target above his head.

“Uncuff him, Mulder. He’s not going anywhere,”

Mulder uncocks his pencil launching hand, considering her. 

“You’re not going to run, right?” he asks the kid, who shrugs. Mulder gives her an imploring look, but she raises a single eyebrow. It is not a skill he possesses, and he goes briefly crosseyed in retaliation. She is careful not to smile, although she can feel one trying to flick at the edges of her lips. 

“Don’t make me chase you,” Mulder warns, unlocking the cuffs. David heaves himself up from the floor and slouches towards a chair in the far corner. His pointedly turned back is an eloquent condemnation, but at least it isn’t a shrug.

“Now what,” Scully asks. The…goo on her jacket is starting to dry, forming large swaths of unpleasantly stiff fabric. She pokes at a patch without much hope. She has no idea what it is.

“The school secretary called his mom. She’s on her way.” 

She can’t find much to say to that, so she sits down at a desk. It’s been over a decade since she’s sat at a desk in a high school. She conducts a lackadaisical probe for feelings of nostalgia, but doesn’t find any.

Mulder sits down beside her. He is very close to her. Despite the ungodly tuition this place must demand, the desk are just as crowded they were in her public high school.

She wishes for some coffee. It would be nice to cradle the heat, and indulge in the ritual. But at this angle she can hold the blurry outline of her partner’s profile in the corner of her eye, and there is also comfort in that.

They sit. Mulder plays with the pencil, spinning it across his knuckles until it snaps. He looks at it in surprise, then at David. Except the boy is still sitting in the corner. Eventually Scully reaches the level of boredom she knows Mulder is waiting for. 

“Okay, tell me.”

“Poltergeists.” He grins like a boy. 

She decides to begin with the imprecision of that statement, then tackle the non-existence issue, but the rapid clicking of heels in the hallway cuts her short. 

Across the room, David pivots towards the sound. His face is flat with dread, but his shoulders are cupping forward. Curving convexly towards the herald of his mother’s arrival like a receiving dish homing in on a new signal. 

Scully notices, and wonders how many day care pickups and after school enrichment programs it had taken to cement that response so firmly. Sustaining it even in the face of certain maternal wrath. 

Mrs. Sutton herself is tall, smooth, and highly polished. Dressed in an outfit that Scully would bet costs a grand, and her haircut half that again. She looks like a New York lawyer, and seems entirely unfazed to find her son being guarded by two darkly-suited strangers. 

“What is it this time, Davy? Firecrackers in the plumbing, or have you graduated to a nuclear arsenal?” 

Scully watches David’s shoulders lose their hopeful curve, smoothing him into nothing but a blank face. A window rattles briefly in the growing squall as they all stare at each other. Then Mulder springs up to show his badge and begins the introductions.

“Mrs. Sutton? I’m Fox Mulder, and this is my partner, Dana Scully. We’re with the Federal Bureau of Investigations.”

“The FBI?” It was obviously a level or response above what Mrs. Sutton was expecting. She moves closer to her son, but he goes back to his beloved wall. Glaring at the suddenly ticking radiator.

“We’re here because some questions have been raised regarding a couple incidents at the school,” Mulder says. 

Scully admires the blandness of his face, and the emptiness of the words - sometimes he launched directly into tales about ghosties, and ghoulies, and long-leggedy beasties. That approach rarely works well, and tends to involve almost terminal levels of eye rolling.

“School generated incidents, or David Sutton generated incidents?” Mrs. Sutton asks.

“Paranormal incidents.” Mulder goes for the gold. Scully indulges in a small sigh. Mrs Sutton simply looks at him without changing expression.

“Excuse me?”

“You know. Objects flying through the air with no apparent motivating force. Loud bangs or thumping with no origin. Glass shattering for no reason. Winds strong enough to move objects and people.” Mulder is warming to his topic, but Mrs Sutton cuts him off.

“Are you talking about poltergeists?” A world of incredulity in that little question. Scully knows it will roll right off her partner. 

“In essence, yes.”

“Actual, real, poltergeist?”

Mulder nods. Mrs Sutton narrows her gaze. 

“Agent…”

“Mulder,” Mulder fills in helpfully.

“Yes. Agent Mulder, are you seriously trying to discuss poltergeist with me.”

“Do you deny witness any unusual activity occurring near your son?”

Mrs. Sutton makes a short noise that can only be described as extreme prejudice. Scully does not pinch her nose, or offer any other disloyal motions. She simply takes a moment to wonder how badly the outfall of irritating a New York litigator is going to hurt.

“You’re being serious,” Mrs. Sutton makes one final attempt.

“Yes.” Mulder is implacable. 

Mrs. Sutton looks heavenward, no doubt seeking intercession. “Okay Agent Mulder. We will play it your way. Of course I have never seen anything unexplainable happening around David.”

Quietly, barely carrying over the sound of the slowly rattling window, David Sutton tells his mother to stop lying.

Mrs. Sutton spins.

“Just stop,” he says again. Seemingly addressing the radiator. There are flushed patches on his cheeks, and his voice is charged with some bolstered determination. 

“What?” Mrs. Sutton seems destined to spend the night lost in some type of astonishment.

“Strange things happen all the time. They’ve been happening since Dad left. That glass bowl broke, for no reason. And that bird dropped dead out of the sky. And the pool overflowed. Then he left.” 

“Davy, those were just coincidence. Your dad’s leaving had nothing to do with you, or any supposed incidents. It barely had anything to do with me. He just -“ she seems to run out of works.

“He didn’t want me anymore.” David says. Certain he is holding the truth. 

Mrs. Sutton sighs, putting away her anger and running a hand across David’s head. Soothing peace back into her child. But he won’t accept it.

“You didn’t want me, either.” 

Scully feels her own heart clench, collateral damage from the barb sinking deep into Mrs. Sutton. 

“Dad left, but those things kept happening. So you sent me here.”

“None of those have anything to do with each other.” 

“Do you even love me anymore?” David’s shoulders are again reaching towards his mother. His chin shakes, like a much younger child. Mrs. Sutton looks at him open mouthed. Standing condemned before the gurgling radiator, and the suddenly noticeable hum off the florescent bulbs.

Scully looks over at Mulder, who is watch the pair with unmasked fascination. Is her partner seeing moments of his own childhood reflected back? Maybe, but she doubts it. Based on what she’s witnessed, the Mulders leaned towards crushing stillness and silence, unleavened by any sort of emotional reciprocity. If anything, this scene is the negative of his childhood.

“How could you ever doubt that?” Mrs. Sutton finally asks. The words have a liquid hitch in them, and the polish Scully had first seen on her is gone. She looks suddenly desperate. 

David pinches lips together. The skin around them is white from his effort not to cry. 

“Davy, your dad left, and I still had to travel. I sent you here to give you some sort of continuity. So you could have friends.”

So, Mrs. Sutton is not a lawyer. Constant travel could make her part of the diplomatic corps. Had their earlier wait been her drive from New York, or her charter jet from D.C?

“Davy, what—“ Mrs. Sutton luffs her sails, and drops whatever tack she had been on. “Tell me why,” is all she says.

The boy’s breath is hitching, caught in the borderland between crying and not crying. Scully remembers making that sound as she watched her father deploy to sea. She remembers the twist in her throat and how hard it was to breath. 

“You stopped saying you love me,” David finally gets out. Everything in his body is clenched.

“What?” She’s back to being perplexed.

“You did,” David is crying now. “You did, you did, you did.” 

“David, my son. I never stopped. Everything I do, and everything I think, is because I love you.” 

David slumps. The radiator and the window and the lights all fall silent in the same instant. It breaks Mulder from his trance, and he looks around. 

“I’d like to take my son home, now.” Mrs. Sutton has her arm around David, and he is leaning into her.

“Of course,” Scully says. It must be the first time the other woman really looks at her. She does a literal double take at the state of Scully’s jacket.

“Jesus, what happened to you?” she asks. 

 

ACT THREE

“You know, 90 percent of all poltergeist activities occur in close proximity to teenagers,” Mulder offers the general observation. They are back in the car, driving south, and the interior is filled with the faint sense of accusation.

“Hey, Scully?” He tries again. The tinge of ozone becomes more obvious. He grins. 

“Don’t,” she finally says.

“I wasn’t doing anything,” he protests.

Scully snorts. Elegantly. In his opinion, she does most things elegantly. 

Outside the windshield the clouds are massing. A mid-atlantic thunderstorm brewing. The bristling weather and the hum of the wheels evokes one of his sparse good memories from childhood. Road trips with his entire family in the close dark, suspended between here and there as his father steered them through the night.

Beside him, another sort of potential energy finally finds earth. “Ectoplasm,” his partner says with great vehemence.

“Yes,” he agrees.

“Are you aware that it’s essentially snot?”

“Yes.”

“And that I was essentially covered in it?”

“Yes.”

“And that most scientist, including myself, don’t believe it exists?”

“Yes.”

“Stop saying yes,” Scully snaps.

“Better you than me?” he risks, and holds his breath.

There is a long moment of equipotential, then Scully laughs. She curls a hand around his bicep, and squeezes. He allows himself to enjoy the feel of her hands touching him. Strong, competent and solid. She is a doctor, as well as a Federal Agent. 

“I’m going to have to burn those clothes,” she tells him.

“Well, that I sincerely regret. I liked that jacket.”

“You liked how that jacket fit,” she corrects him, and he nods despite the word being only the partially true. The jacket did fit nicely. But it also suited her. The austerity of the cut making her competence shine out like a lumen,until she becomes the most compelling thing in any room. It is fascinating to watch other people look at her while she’s wearing that jacket.

“I can’t explain what happened, back in Connecticut.” She says it like an admission. He shrugs.

“Poltergeist activity really is overwhelmingly linked to teenagers. And you saw what that place was like. The very cliche of a New England Ivy-League boarding school. It was the perfect breeding ground for David to other find other discontents. 

“So, do you think it was all him?”

“I think he was the conduit. The rest of them were just added energy. Alone, he could made the windows rattle. Together, they got whatever was in those woods.”

“That has pretty dark implications, Mulder. There were what, 20 kids in the circle you broke up? Do you think all the kids at the school felt as cast off as David?”

“Dunno.” 

“Well, you’re the scion of a wealthy New England family. I’m just a common Navy brat. If you don’t know, we’re doomed to ignorance.” She slides her hand down to the crook of his elbow, settling in.

“I don’t think you have to go all the way to a boarding school to find kids who think their parents have forsaken them,” Mulder protests.

“You have to admit the family separation adds a potent variable. It’s easy for an adult to confabulate distance with disinterest, let alone a fifteen-year old.”

“It’s sexy when you use big words,” Mulder tells her. It is a substitute for telling her that distance can also be a state of mind. The creeping silence between his parents engulfing the entire household. Until any talk about his latest home game couldn’t overcome the sucking gravity. Never mind discussions of affection. 

“Goof,” she tells him, with one of those smiles that is more a look in her eye than movement of her lips. Except Scully has never been blind to subtext. Inside her smile is understanding, and apology. 

He waves it away. He likes the dark, and the conversation with this woman. Seeing the court and spark of her intelligence. He wants it to continue, not get mired in childhood afflictions. “Did you know the Greeks through there were six forms of love?” 

“Agape,” she says. Then, “that’s the only one I know.”

“The holes in your substandard Catholic education,” he tells her. She obliges him by rolling her eyes.

“Well, what are the other five, then?”

“Eros, Philia, Ludus, Pragma, Philautia” he lists them off. 

“Sadly, Latin wasn’t part of my substandard education, either.”

“Eros, romantic love. Philia, the love of deep friendship. Ludus, playful love.” He cuts his eyes to her and wiggles his eyebrows. “Pragma, long stand love between married couples. Philautia, love of the self.”

“Seems complicated.” 

“Nah. You just have to match the right love to the right person. Like a connect the dot games. Easy peasy.”

Silence refills the car, but he can feel Scully thinking. “What?” he asks. But she just shakes her head.

“I’m thinking of what I’m going to write in my report,” she finally says. 

He believes it, because Scully doesn’t casually lie. But reports are not the only thing on her mind. He’d like more conversation in the dark. Words are, to him, are as good as foreplay. But she’s folded herself over the center console to put her head on his shoulder, and that is good in its own way.

 

ACT FOUR

Mulder wonders if he might explode.

They came home together, and she’s been mysteriously inside his personal bubble ever since. Her scent is in his nostrils. The weight of her gaze is palpable. The feel of it is almost sultry, and the promises for tonight seem to be rolling off her skin. He breathes sharply and wonders if it would be unmanly to swoon.

Probably, but he’s still considering the move carefully.

Now she is leaning against the door as he tidies the kitchen. Eyes on his hands as he marshals soap suds and kitchen towels. He clears his throat, and snaps the towel out. Anticipation roils in his stomach.

“Would you care to accompany me into the living room?” he asks her. She pushes away from the wall silently. He brushes past her, feeling like a lion pacing in a zoo. Impressive in his obvious allure, but also caged and watched.

He realizes he doesn’t know what to do once he reaches the living room. Pushing his toes into the pattern on the rug, and shoving his hands into his pockets. He’s not sure he’s ever been so deliberately seduced before.

“Scully,” he finally says, with a little quirk in his lips. “Are you about to take advantage of me?”

“I love you,” she says.

He looks back at her. 

The Scully clan doesn’t shun displays of love, but they don’t say it either. Lace curtain Irish for certain, but so tightlipped they could pass for the long-gone Puritans of his own home state. So yes, he stares. 

She offers a wry eyebrow in return. Lapping at his surprise like a Cheshire Cat. Pleased to be known so closely, and pleased at finding enough space to surprise him. The intimacy fizzes low in the parasympathetic division of his autonomic nervous system.

“Was that for the record?” he asks. 

She’s very close to him again. Standing on her tiptoes so she can yank his head down and nip the hinge of his jaw. “Don’t be impertinent.”

“Oh, no ma’am,” he tells her, hand over his heart.

She smiles, and slides her hand down to the small of his back, pulling herself into him. He circles his own arms around her loosely. Swaying to the music of the spheres. 

He’d never doubted that she loves him. Dana Katherine Scully has ever been self-possessed, and self-contained. Very few are allowed to enter her atomic orbit, and those who do remain in the outer covalence. Sharing her bed is no guarantee of intimacy. 

Yet his own perigee is tight enough to recognize the scent of her soap, and he has been allowed to witness the amount of pizza she consumes when she has decided to abandon culinary restraint. 

Sill, he couldn’t deny the allure of her words. 

Her hand moves to his belly, sliding between shirt and skin. “Hey,” he slaps his own hand over the tickle, trapping her palm against his skin. “What do you think you’re doing?”

She smirks at him. “I’m admiring the symmetry of your rectus abdominus.” She flexes her fingers, “You should take off your shirt, so I can see them better.”

“Wow, Dr. Scully. Flirting in med school must have been something to behold,” he says, but obediently grasps the hem of his shirt. Her hands chases the fabric up his stomach, parting across his pectorals and rejoining to clasp behind his neck. He submits to the request and kisses her. 

She hums, low down in her throat. He presses his hips forward. His body had been ready for hours, his blood ready to rush and his head ready to spin. He keeps advancing his tongue, finding new textures. That’s when something in his neck pops. Loud enough that she starts. 

“Woman,” he rubs at the sudden ache. “I told you. This wouldn’t keep happening if you’d just keep your shoes on.”

“Poor Mulder,” she admonishes him. Then she pushes off the balls of her feet, hopping into the air. He catches her before gravity can, grunting as her legs wrap around his waist and her ankles locking behind him. She uses his hair to tip his head back. 

For a second, he thinks about driving her against the wall. Wanton and carnal, until someone gives in and screams. But the fingers in his hair are gentle, and her mouth is softly sweet against his.

He sits on the couch, instead. Breaking the kiss and pushing her shoulders back to give himself room to untuck her shirt. Working the buttons until he can shuck the fabric down her arms. Her bra he unhooks one-handed. It sags open, mortally wounded, and Scully laughs.

“Show off.”

“I’m a man of unusual skills. There aren’t many of us who can undo a bra one handed.”

“In my experience, there aren’t many men who can undo a bra with two hands. Which is strange, if you really stop and consider how much your ilk likes mammary glands.”

He drops his hands. “It kills it when you call them mammary glands.”

Scully puts her own hands on his shoulders, and slides forward in his lap. She presses down, and looks arch. “It does not appear to be dead.”

He laughs, and puts an arm behind her back so he can slide them to the floor. Laying her down so he can press the full length of his torso into her, to feel the living heat of her skin. He loves it. But that trick only works on soft surfaces. She grunts. 

“Sorry,” he says, and rolls them until he’s below her.

“It’s okay,” she tells him, then relieves them both of their pants. Shimmying out of hers, and pushing his off with her feet. Her hands swim across his body as she kisses him. He follows her pace, and when she stops, he reaches up to tuck her hair behind her ear.

“What is it?”

“Mulder, I do love you. I’m not good a saying it.” She tucks her chin, showing a properly Scullyish look of contrition. “I’m terrible at saying it. But I do love you. It would break my heart if you doubted that.”

“You show me, Scully. You show me every day.”

She is still above him. Her hands are pressed to his chest. The arches of her feet and the inside of her calves fitted tightly against the outside of his hips. Their faces are a foot apart. She is leith, and supple, and her hair shines like a copper penny in the light. 

“I know you. I saw you at that school, with David Sutton. You need the words, too.”

“Maybe I do,” he admits.

“I want to give you the things you need. The ones in my power to give.”

“I’m pretty sure you are currently smack in the middle of giving me the things I need.” He presses his hips up. She sucks in some air at movement, then laughs.

“I guess I am,” she says, then leans down and resumes all previous activities. 

Mulder knows the deliberation that has preceded this conversation. Pronouncements of love will now be included in Scully’s working lexicon. Not daily, but certainly twice weekly. Maybe three times. 

He thinks, as she stiffens and arches against him, that he is going to enjoy finding out which one she will choose.

FIN

**Author's Note:**

> Historical Notes: In the 13th century King Fredrick II, Holy Roman Emperor, conducted an experiment on language deprivation. He acquired fifty infants, and hired nurses to care for the children. The women were instructed to bathe and nurse the babies but not to fondle, cuddle, or talk to them. It was assumed the infants would spontaneously manifest the natural language that God gave to Adam. Instead, all the infants died. An Italian historian named Salimbene di Adam hypothesized that "the children could not live without laying of the hands, and gestures, and gladness of countenance, and blandishments."
> 
> I picture Mulder's childhood post-abduction being full of silence, leaving him with a craving for overt and unambiguous affection. And I picture Scully might have to remember that words are important.
> 
> Many thanks to Claire for editing and proof reading. I hope you enjoyed.


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